Editor’s Column: Central’s Web Issues Are Getting Annoying

February 9, 2018

by Angela Fortuna

Over the course of the past several weeks, Central Connecticut State University students and faculty received 11 emails from Campus Announcements regarding web-related issues that continue to be unresolved.

The university has not provided students with any specifics regarding the reasoning behind the reappearance of web issues. The emails notifying students and faculty started in the middle of January on Jan. 17, and have since still been an actively unsolved problem.

The website has been described as having “frequent intermittent technical issues causing it to go offline for brief periods,” according to an email sent through Campus Announcements on Jan. 29 to students and faculty.

With the recent major web issues happening in the midst of the academic semester, it is concerning that the university didn’t notice the problem and fix any issues before the start of the spring semester.

Although the disruptions are “brief,” they still affect university students and personnel in different ways. Students and faculty need to access the website daily during the semester in order to access programs such as Microsoft Outlook, Blackboard and WebCentral.

In the most recent email sent out on Monday, Feb. 5, Campus Announcements informed students that a web migration process will take place, moving Central’s webpage to a “larger capacity and more powerful server.” CCSU hopes that this change will help resolve the web issues that have been occurring.

“To ensure uninterrupted service, we will be redirecting www.ccsu.edu to Central Pipeline, which will enable web users to access web services and utilities such as Banner, Blackboard and virtually all other CCSU webpages. As soon as the migration is complete, we’ll restore the homepage,” according to the email.

Without a website, prospective students will be unable to apply to the university and will be delayed in their application process. Whether or not this has actually made an impact on the decision of prospective students to apply to Central is unknown; however, if I went back in time to being a senior in high school and saw a university I was applying to had a website with issues, it would affect my opinion of the university.

With the university having to make the sudden change to a “higher level server,” it makes me wonder why the university chose a lower level server in the first place. The website was updated from its previous version last year and has since faced issues.

It is important to note that the issues could be worse. However, students and faculty are still faced with an inconvenience when trying to keep up with school work and assignments. Hopefully, switching to a newer, “higher level” web server will allow students and faculty to access the website without constant problems.

The consequences of having an unusable website will affect how others see our university; if we cannot fix web issues, how can we expect other issues to be handled efficiently?